Dr. Mercola, a successful internet marketer dispensing health and nutrition information, is obviously a smart guy, and I have on occasion found some information on his site interesting. Unfortunately, I just never know if I can trust what I find there. With some frequency, he make's statements that I know to be false -- and usually it's stuff related to his bias in favor of consuming animal protein or his view that diets completely free of it are dangerous. So when I stumbled upon an article of his, which suggests that there are no 100 year old vegetarians and then uses this idea as evidence that obviously a vegan diet is not good for living a healthy long life, I thought this would be a pretty easy example to share with people to illustrate how UNcredible his anti-vegetarian perspective is.

First off because Scott Nearing comes to mind. You may remember him as the economics professor who was black listed from academia for speaking out against child labor in the early 1900s, and then against the great wars that followed. Nearing then went on to inspire millions to live off the grid with his books on Living the Good Life. Scott made it to 100, living with his equally vigorous wife Helen shown in the picture above. They built their own house with their own hands at ages 60 and 80, and continued living in it, off the grid until their deaths (she died at 90 in a car accident -- but a friend of mine went hiking in the woods with Helen a few months before her untimely death and said that she almost couldn't keep up with the 90 year old Helen.) The Nearings had been vegetarian for decades before transitioning to veganism. I also know plenty of long term vegans in their 70s and 80s, and compared to the non-vegans I know of this age, the vegans stand out for how vital and functional they appear. So it struck me as unlikely that a group of people who are more active and cognitively sharp than is typical for their age, would be more vibrant up until their 70s and 80s and then suddenly drop off the planet in numbers greater than their less functional peers. So I thought in spite of how few cultures have embraced ethical vegetarianism -- there must be some others.

Leave it to Google to confirm Mercola's misinformation. In five minutes time I found:

This Chinese woman who claims to have made it to 110 years without eating any meat:

And then there's Dr. Ellsworth Wareham -- who is now 101 years old and has been vegan over half his life, and was still helping out as a surgeon until he was 95. There were a few other names that popped up in my brief Google search -- but there was conflicting info about them too and I didn't want to spend more time sorting it out -- since I already had decent factual information to discredit Mercola's anti-veg ranting.